360Giving receives Lottery funding boost

360Giving, which campaigns to open up UK grants data and make grant-making more informed and effective, has received a £745,000 award from the Big Lottery Fund.

The Big Lottery Fund grant will help 360Giving to increase the amount of grants data published by funders, foundations and trusts as standardised open data. The project will embark on a number of activities which can be separated into three areas: outreach & engagement; publication; and tech development.

360Giving’s main goals are:

To support more grantmakers to publish their grants data in an open, accessible and standardised way

To build an evidence base about how open grants data can be used for better decision-making and learning

To develop tools that help people to understand and use the data.

The first platform to bring together this data in an accessible format, GrantNav, is due to launch this autumn.

The Big Lottery Fund already publishes all its grants made since 2004 in-line with the open data standard developed by 360Giving, and is now being joined by two other grantmakers BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief. Publishing their grants to the 360Giving standard for the first time, Children in Need have opened up more than 1,600 grants worth over £94 million, while in mid-August Comic Relief will publish over £140 million grants. These grants will be comparable with the other 20 organisations already publishing to the 360Giving standard.